The Berlin Boxing Club

Karl Stern is leaving his last class of the school year when he is intercepted by some Nazi-sympathizing bullies known as the “Wolf Pack.” The group consists of three boys: Gerz Diener, Franz Hellendorf, and Julius Austerlitz. Because Karl’s teacher, Herr Boch, has kept him behind to alphabetize some books, he finds himself facing down these three boys alone in the school hallway. The boys accuse Karl of hiding his Jewishness from them, and he is surprised because he has never considered himself to be obviously Jewish. He knows he does not look Jewish, being tall and fair, and has been raised by an agnostic Jewish family who live in a non-Jewish neighborhood. Further, his surname, Stern, is not a common Jewish name. He even shares some of the popular German views of Jews: that they control all of the finances, that they tend to keep to themselves, and that they are obviously foreign: “Jews sounded different. They looked different. They were different” (9).  

Even so, the three boys attack Karl, pulling down his pants so that he is forced to show his circumcised penis: “[N]o matter how much the rest of me looked and felt like a gentile, I had a penis that was undeniably Jewish” (8).